Your chance to hire an amazing QA engineer in Austin

I was sad to hear that Apple are letting go some remote workers in their video software division, especially because that means Doyle Rockwell is leaving. He's been a driving force behind Apple's professional video products like Motion and Final Cut Pro for the last 8 years, but since he recently moved from LA to Austin to be closer to family, he's fallen prey to some job cuts focused on off-site employees.

I know the whole of my old team is going to miss him, he's truly one of the rare great testers that Joel so recently described. He's deeply interested in software, very good at both automating tests and spending days tracking awkward bugs down manually when he needed to. He actually really cared about our customers, which both made him an awesome resource in design discussions, and led him to spend many long hours of his own time building helper tools and tutorials to work around issues in the software. You can check out some of them at motionsmarts.com, as you can see he did all of this anonymously. Anyone who's asked a motion graphics question on Apple's official forum is likely to have got a reply from 'specialcase' too. This exchange from December is typical Doyle, with the user responding "Nothing short of sweet. Thanks specialcase, worked perfectly!" None of this was an official part of his job, he went above and beyond to help Apple's users.

Anyway, he's a terrible self-promoter and has a young family to support, so I wanted to thank him for all the help he's given my products over the years with a heads-up to the tech world that they have a wonderful chance to hire a great new employee. His email address is specialcase at mac.com, please drop him a line if you're interested in hearing more about how he could help you, you won't regret it!